"Jack And The Wonder Beans" by James Still--Book Review

James Still--Photo by University Of Kentucky

Still, James & Illustrated by Margot Tomes. Jack and the Wonder Beans. (New York, G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1977)

This is James Still's Appalachian adaptation of the classic fairy tale "Jack and the Bean Stalk".  It is somewhat heavy on dialect and humor and yet it is probably better for your children than a simple fairy tale.  As for children and fairy tales, I would be a lot better satisfied if the majority of American and Appalachian children were being raised on fairy tales than computer based games of mass destruction.  We never seemed to have nearly as many problems with our children when their parents were sitting by their beds reading them stories about woodcutters chopping up criminal wolves in order to save little red haired girls than we are now when we hand each child some form of electronic device and leave them to their own devices with games in which weapons of mass destruction are used against the general public.  This book is one of at least three little books which G. P. Putnam's Sons published for James Still at the height of his national popularity which was rooted in the success of "River of Earth".  Two of the others are "Way Down Yonder On Troublesome Creek" and "The Wolf Pen Rusties Appalachian Riddles & Gee-Haw Whimmy Diddles".  For all three of these books, Putnam used New York illustrators which I suspect was a convenience to the publisher.  I also suspect the books might have been more authentically Appalachian if they had been illustrated by genuine Appalachian artists.  

"Jack and the Wonder Beans" makes a legitimate attempt to utilize Appalachian dialect, at which James Still was an acknowledged expert, while also attempting to not make the language unreadable for the general public.  I suspect that the original text, as Still would have sent it to the publisher, was considerably more rooted in dialect.   The dialect in the book seems "cleaned up" at times especially when you compare it to the dialect in "River of Earth" or his short stories.  The art work also seems at times to be much more generically "Southern" than truly Appalachian.  But the book is loaded with expressions I heard as a child in Knott County such as "a hog on ice" and "feet as big as corn sleds".  Any reference to a corn sled can generally be assumed to be Appalachian or Southern.  In all my travels over half of America and a bit of Mexico and Canada, I have never heard anyone outside Appalachia refer to the family corn sled and I have to admit that I have recently used a reference to "that fancy corn sled" which Old Saint Nick drove "behind them funny looking deer". Corn sleds have always been handy both on the farm and in a bit of writing intended to educate the outside world about Appalachia.  I commend James Still for having reverted to the use of a corn sled in this book. 

While this book is a bit dated, which is not unusual in the many books I have read and written about on this blog.  But it is well worth reading both for children and adults.  I often read children's literature when I want a break from more academic reading.  This book is also widely sold on used book websites and should be easy to locate.  If you want a reminder of the old Appalachian dialect of your ancestors, this is a good place to start.